Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German EditionWeininger, Otto
Philosophy
Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition
Weininger, Otto
Character; Sex; Sex (Psychology); Sexual ethics
This work has decided in favour of the soul against the absurd and
pitiable psychology without a soul. In fact, it may be doubted if, on
the assumption that the soul exists and has free thought and free-will,
there can be a science of causal laws and self-imposed rules of willing
and thinking. I have no intention of trying to inaugurate a new era of
rational psychology. I wish to follow Kant in positing the existence of
a soul as the unifying and central conception, without which any
explanation or description of psychic life, however faithful in its
details, however sympathetically undertaken, must be wholly
unsatisfying. It is extraordinary how inquirers who have made no attempt
to analyse such phenomena as shame and the sense of guilt, faith and
hope, fear and repentance, love and hate, yearning and solitude, vanity
and sensitiveness, ambition and the desire for immortality, have yet the
courage simply to deny the ego because it does not flaunt itself like
the colour of an orange or the taste of a peach. How can Mach and Hume
account for such a thing as style, if individuality does not exist? Or
again, consider this: no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection
in a glass, whilst there is no man who could spend his life in
a room surrounded with mirrors. Can this fear, the fear of the
doppelganger,[14] be explained on Darwinian principles? The word
doppelganger has only to be mentioned to raise a deep dread in the mind
of any man. Empirical psychology cannot explain this; it reaches the
depths. It cannot be explained, as Mach would explain the fear of little
children, as an inheritance from some primitive, less secure stage of
society. I have taken this example only to remind the empirical
psychologists that there are many things inexplicable on their
hypotheses.
[14] It is notable that women are devoid of this fear; female
doppelgangers are not heard of.
Why is any man annoyed when he is described as a Wagnerite, a
Nietzchite, a Herbartian, or so forth? He objects to be thought a mere
echo. Even Ernst Mach is angry in anticipation at the thought that some
friend will describe him as a Positivist, Idealist, or any other
non-individual term. This feeling must not be confused with the results
of the fact that a man may describe himself as a Wagnerite, and so
forth. The latter is simply a deep approval of Wagnerism, because the
approver is himself a Wagnerite. The man is conscious that his agreement
is in reality a raising of the value of Wagnerism. And so also a man
will say much about himself that he would not permit another to say of
him. As Cyrano de Bergerac put it:
“Je me les sers moi-même, avec assez de verve,
Mais je ne permets pas qu’un autre me les serve.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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